Post-structuralism philosopher Judith Butler on Friday delivered a lecture in Goddard Chapel regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
Butler, a Maxine Elliott professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley has published works in the fields of post-structuralism, gender theory and feminism. Butler articulated the goals of the BDS campaign, which she explained encourages Palestinians to refuse to cooperate or seek any form of rapprochement with entities or organizations that maintain support for the incumbent Israeli government's treatment of the Palestinian Arab population.
The event was co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, English and Sociology, the Peace and Justice Studies program and Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
Butler said that initiating relations with Israel-based organizations that did not oppose the Israeli government constitutes tacit legitimization and ratification of the government's practices toward Palestinian Arabs.
"The BDS movement draws upon a long history of rejecting norms of alliance and refusing to normalize relations based on exploitation and colonial subjugation," Butler said.
According to Butler, the BDS movement is concerned not only with bringing about the end of the alleged occupation but also with addressing the rights of Palestinians and the return of Palestinian refugees. She said that the dualistic language that characterizes much of Palestinian-Israeli discourse serves only to undermine the issue.
"I want to suggest that we are not talking about a soccer game. It strikes me that that language really misses the entire point. The point is to be for justice and you could be any nationality and still be in the struggle for justice," she said. "One is rather asking for a new constellation for political life in which colonization has come to an end."
SJP member Ann Yacoubian, a sophomore, said Butler's focus on human rights and justice, rather than on the theme of conflict, was especially illuminating.
"One thing she said that I thought was very important was that we need to stop thinking of ourselves as pro-Palestine and pro-Israel. Instead, we're pro-justice," Yacoubian said. "It fundamentally comes to human rights and inequality."
Butler also discussed the State of Israel's Law of Return vis-? -vis the right to return of Palestinian refugees, who were, according to her, forced from the land following Israeli occupation and currently face exclusionary and discriminatory policies.
"Israel's own Law of Return works in relation to its refusal to grant the Palestinian right of return," she said. "The Law of Return establishes the State of Israel as the sanctuary of all Jews who conform within the contemporary rabbinical definition of what it means to be a Jew."
Butler argued that the Israeli Law of Return should be suspended until Palestinian refugees' rights are no longer subordinated to the retention of an Israeli demographic majority.
"It is clearly necessary to impose an indefinite moratorium on the Law of Return," she said. "Under the conditions in which the Law of Return is instrumentalized as purely demographic for the state of Israel, it is discriminatory and anti-democratic. Until the Law of Return is combined with the right of return, there should be no Law of Return."
Butler criticized the identification of Zionism as equivalent to Judaism and argued that the State of Israel should not be regarded as the unilateral arbiter of a monolithic Jewish identity.
"We have to separate Jewishness from Zionism in my view and we have to produce new modes of social democratic struggle that can be part of a counter-Israeli Jewishness," she said. "The State of Israel does not get to decide who is Jewish and who is not, and it cannot make the claim that it represents the Jewish people, and it's very worrisome how many people accept that."
SJP member Alexa Stevens, a junior, felt that Butler's lecture illuminated the student group's position as an entity that supports the widely misunderstood BDS movement.
"In terms of the discourse at Tufts, I think it helped to clarify things. I think it helped to dispel certain myths and clarify where we stand as a group that advocates BDS," Stevens said.